1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a vehicle motion control system designed to integratedly control steering, deceleration, and acceleration. More particularly, the invention concerns a vehicle motion control system, intended to conduct vehicle motion control based on vehicle jerk information.
2. Description of the Related Art
For a conventional type of vehicle, components from a steering wheel to a steering gear that actually transmits a steering force to tires, from an accelerator pedal to an engine throttle valve, and from a brake pedal to a brake hydraulic unit, have been directly connected via a mechanical linkage that includes hydraulics. In contrary to this conventional scheme, various types of by-wire systems have been proposed that dispense with the above mechanical linkage by detecting the input levels of the vehicle driver to the respective operating units via sensors and converting the detected input levels into electrical signals before transmitting each of the signals. In the by-wire systems, not only the input levels of the driver, but also control commands assigned to compensate for any excesses or shortages of the input levels can be transmitted to the steering gear, the engine, and the brake hydraulic unit, and the appropriate motion control of the vehicle can be conducted without being governed by the input levels. These systems designed so that each can independently control steering, acceleration (driving), and deceleration (braking), are likely to achieve higher wheel performance by integrating the respective functions.
In a known example of such an integrated vehicle control system (refer to, for example, Patent Document 1), a processing unit uses the ambient environmental information and operating requests of a vehicle to calculate information on control targets for operating the actuators associated with control units, and calculates the information intended to assign a driving force and a braking force to each control unit. The latter information intended to assign a driving force and a braking force is based on the information relating to the calculated control targets (See JP-A-2005-186831).